Pilot African Postgraduate Academy (PAPA) 2020 for African Postdoctoral Researchers – Bamako, Mali

o “Point Sud, Muscler le savoir local”, a Bamako based Institute for Advanced Studies, invites applications for a three year fellowship from early career scholars based at African universities. Successful applicants will be part of a cohort of 15 early career scholars in the Pilot African Postgraduate Academy (PAPA).

Application Deadline: 31st October 2019.

Eligible Countries: African

To be Taken at (Country): Bamako, Mali

About the Award: PAPA is a Three-year post-doctoral training programme, held mostly in French, and generously funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation (Germany) under the supervision of Prof. Mamadou Diawara (University of Frankfurt, Germany) and Prof. Elísio Macamo (University of Basel, Switzerland). The courses in Bamako will take place every year in the first two weeks of March and September, starting in March 2020 and ending in September 2022. The programme aims at fostering among promising early career African scholars in the social sciences and humanities a commitment to the value of scholarship for its own sake, cultivating their interest in conceptual understanding and promoting an orientation towards the use of knowledge acquired in Africa to contribute to the further development of science in general.

For this reason, the intellectual agenda of the programme focuses on basic research, i.e. a concern with conceptual understanding as opposed to the search for practical solutions to already known and formulated problems. It will train and coach fellows in such crucial fields of scholarly expertise as research design and practice, theory building and conceptual clarification as well as knowledge transfer and sharing. The overall rationale of the training programme is to encourage fellows to look for and formulate the questions and problems for which their disciplines and policy makers at large already have answers and solutions. This is part of an ambitious and pressing project of establishing a firm scientific foundation for the pursuit and production of knowledge in Africa by Africans in dialogue with their local and international peers.

Type: Postdoctoral

Eligibility:

• The programme focuses thematically on conflict, migration, youth and urbanization in Africa. Applicants should have finished their PhD not longer than 10 years before applying and should not be older than 50 years of age.

• Excellent French and a good command of English are basic requirements.
• Applicants are invited to set out in writing (10 pages in total, only French language accepted) the issue they want to deal with, literature review in the field, how they want to deal with it methodologically, theoretically and conceptually, its relevance to their discipline (social sciences and the humanities) as they understand it, and the scholarly challenges it raises also for the application of their new skills into their own academic activities in their home universities.
• They are also required to propose a publication project that not only foresees the publication of empirical findings, but also contributes to fundamental challenges of knowledge production in their field.
• Applicants should provide a detailed academic CV indicating the evolution of their own intellectual agenda and how it relates to the objectives of PAPA.
• They are also required to produce a letter of commitment by their respective university allowing them to fully participate in the activities of the programme throughout the full three years (absence of around five weeks per year spent abroad, enough time for preparation and follow-up and for the integration of the acquired knowledge into their own research projects).
• If an applicant is not employed by an African university she or he must provide evidence that she or he will be hired by an African institution of higher education before enrollment into the programme.

Number of Awards: 15

Value of Award: Fellows will receive a monthly grant of 300 € on top of travel funds allowing them to attend the courses in Bamako. Meals and hotel expenses are covered in Bamako. A lump sum fund of 10.000 € is foreseen to organize workshops at the home institution, invite researchers and collaboration partners, to attend conferences (in their home countries and abroad), conduct research and work on their publications.

Duration of Award: 3 years

How to Apply: Applications should be submitted to the following address: Dr. Stefan Schmid, s.schmid@em.uni-frankfurt.de.

• It is important to go through all application requirements in the Award Webpage (see Link below) before applying.
• GOODLUCK

Visit Award Webpage for Details